I’m an American who has been living abroad for 20 years. I’m shocked, as I watch my home country being dismantled by oligarchs who sold US democracy. And I talk to other Americans and they’re just like “Oh, well, both sides, you know?”
Do y’all not realize what you’ve done? The US literally has no allies now, no rule of law, and no democracy. You’re living in an authoritarian dictatorship now, run by clowns.
How are so many Americans just going on with their lives like normal?
Consider brexit, an idea so dumb in every way every way, and yet it happened. Many journalists pointed out how russian influence and social media formed peoples votes, how it brought out the worst side in many of my countrymen, how many regretted it almost immediately. Turns out its really easy to get stupid people to hate things.
The fundamental issue really does seem to be education, which is why conservatives everywhere try to cripple and dismantle it. Conservatism in the US spearheaded anti-intellectualism, but the ideology everywhere else is not far behind; constantly appealing to the lowest common denominator. This proves that conservatism does not believe it can survive with an educated populace.
I’m guilty of calling them stupid myself, but the only thing that separates anyone from cavemen is education, and the psychopaths and narcissists of society have shown us that our education systems are not fit for purpose, and holding society back from progress. The failure in our ability to educate the majority sufficiently is one of the greatest threats we face.
I’m both cases my view on the people is the same: they do understand. The information has always been there and publicised. People wanted this.
We don’t like what they want and we call them dumb, but it is no easy task to effectively use propaganda on this many people. It’s also easy to label people “stupid”, which is not true. This mindset genuinely exists. America is a Trump supporting nation. UK is a Brexit supporting nation (I don’t know if current regret surveys would translate into votes, Reform has more support than ever and it is increasing, and surveys last time also predicted that the majority didn’t support Brexit).
There have been a lot of podcasts looking academically how this polarisation and thinking has come about in the last 2 decades. I’m really interested in getting to the bottom of answers of how people are so convinced like this rather than the simplistic and inaccurate conclusion that “they are all dumb”.
Turns out its really easy to get stupid people to hate things.
That’s going to be the byline of this entire era of history. Oof.
I went to jail for protesting citizens united and predatory banking. The news coverage made everyone believe we were just clowns having a party. It felt right, but in the end it meant absolutely nothing.
I have no hope for any government. I only hope that humans will continue to do interesting things despite their government.
Yeah… Citizens United was a big coup for billionaires to put their thumb harder on the scales of injustice. I’m not sure any of this gets better while the billionaires aren’t terrified for their lives.
Buddy I tell ya hwhat. Yer gonna be so happy because we are gonna do bigly interesting things.
We’re gonna build a big arena just for Trump rallies. We’re gonna find a princess to marry Prince Barron, who by the way is young enough that we’ll have the longest stable gubment in American history. King for 70 years bud.
Joel Olsteen is gon’ build big ol churches in ever state. We ain’t worried about prayer in school no more. We’re bringing school to prayer. Christian academy gonna be the normal school. Ever kid in American is gonna learn about being good with Ace Virtueson, Racer and the gang. They’ll learn that fish are fish because god wanted it that way and how we ain’t monkeys. Real science will git done like how many babies can good girls have.
I’m so tired.
If it’s gone so far that we’re back to planting seeds for the future, then all these things can mean a lot down the road.
What’s the alternative? I want to protest, but if I miss work then I might lose my job, which would cost me my health insurance and likely my house. I want to get back on social media and show people where I stand, but these MAGA people are rabid and will come after me for it. I’m ready to step up, but not while Trump has half the country behind him. I’m waiting for a numbers advantage. His approval rating is tanking, and once it gets low enough, I think people like me will be more willing to take bigger risks. Until then, we’re doing what we can while keeping our heads down.
Half of the country, more like 10% it’s the media pumping those numbers up.
You can still start getting organised while keeping your job, let the people who have the means will and time do their part, and do your part, your part may be smaller but it will still end up making a difference.
Even calling your representative will amount to something.
Where does your 10% come from? Of those that voted, he got 49%ish of the vote. Those that didn’t vote effectively made the statement they didn’t care one way or another.
Looking at it another way, the GOP controls both sides of Congress. One of those sides is the House of Representatives because they represent you. In all this nonsense, in whatever that “state of the union/campaign” was, those “representatives” cheered and voted with him. By extension, the people they represent.
Whether we want to admit it or not, it is far closer to half the country then 10%. If nothing else, it’s half the country that felt like having a say.
It depends on where you are.
Where I live, that number might be more like 1%. At My parents place, it’s more like 95%, based on the number of Trump signs that have continuously stayed in yards since 2016.
There was a party a little ways into rural territory and a lot of us went and the hostess was terrified when we started talking bad about Trump because the window was open and the neighbors were hard Trump people with guns.
I hear good things about indivisible… Someday I’ll have enough energy to join up with them
I want to protest, but if I miss work then I might lose my job, which would cost me my health insurance and likely my house.
I think this is exactly why protesting is necessary. It is the entire reason why unions emerged in the first place. Pool together resources, so everyone can join in on a strike and the strike can take weeks or months without people going hungry.
I blame the barely existance of affordable health care, unemployment systems, social housing etc. as a main reason for where the USA got to where it is now. It’s always everyone for themselves and people like Trump or Musk are the very personification of this basic idea underlining every aspect of USA society, on steroids. There is no society, there is only eternal struggle between all individuals who are all very scared of not being succesfull and/or ending in absolute poverty because they dare to think outside of this dominating idea that everyone is what they themselves chose/do/are…
Vote with your wallet. Try not to buy from the big companies if you can help it. It used to be a pain doing this but with a password manager it’s easy to create another account and don’t save your CC on the site if it’s just a one time purchase.
Protesting is fine to let others know they are not alone but the people in charge will not care or see it.
I want to protest, but if I miss work then I might lose my job
Great point.
A better option is to find and join your local union. You can do it quietly, and it might save your job someday. Even if it doesn’t, it’ll absolutely get you paid and treated better.
I went to a weekend protest for my job.
I’ve started being more active in the community and finding people like me out there. It helps.
Bread, circuses and two minutes of hate.
Exactly. The point of all the forever wars and having the CIA overthrow legitimate governments was all in service of bread and circuses.
Even ostensibly “liberal” people are still sucked way more into their personal lives and their “dreams” than they are what is actually happening. I said to my mother recently that she has been “playing house” while the country has been falling apart around her for decades and that all she “did for her kids” was for nothing because she never stepped up to make sure the country didn’t fall apart, thinking that as long as she made enough money and got her kids a good enough education it would “save them.” She spent her life making me feel like her stupid fucking six-bedroom house with a pool that she lived in alone was more important than my life, especially with how much she bitched at me to get a job, any job, any time I was struggling, including when I got fucking cancer. I pointed out that she herself could have been in a much better financial position if instead of selfishly living in it alone she could have been renting out rooms or the whole damn basement to others at reasonable prices and helping alleviate the homeless problem instead patting herself on the back for giving a homeless person ten bucks. All I got were excuses and explanations and no accepting that maybe, jut maybe, she could have been more involved in politics or more compassionate in opening up her home. She even balked at the idea of me suggesting that she ought to be getting ready to Anne Frank this shit and prepare the house to house people who need to hide from Trump’s fucking goons. I said cool, so you’ll be remembered as a Nazi because you’re complicit in being too fucking selfish to share your house with people who literally might be murdered or deported. Your ass would have kicked Anne Frank and her family into the street. Needless to say, whole conversation did not go well. The boomers were so privileged and coddled that they literally got to achieve their dreams while choosing to ignore things like politics entirely. Making sacrifices of their dreams for others is literally not in their interpersonal vocabulary.
These people are out of touch and fuck-nothing is going to wake them up. It’s going to take fascists on their doorstep coming for them and by then it’s way way too fucking late.
Instead of a traditional circus with tamed tigers and acrobats, the US has the unorthodox one, run by crazy clowns.
I’m not a Australian and have never been to America.
It seems like I’ve experienced this feeling with America, and with Australia, more and more over the last decade.
I suspect that the answer to your question is yes, voters do not understand nor particularly care what is happening.
The vast majority of voters base their position on vibe-based reasoning. Low information voters, if you will.
There are many individuals who have upped their meds such that they do not have daily panic attacks. It’s not that people don’t know, it’s that they feel powerless. Some have gone to stand in streets with signs, only to go home to face the same problems unfixed by their actions and then have a panic attack.
Non controlled substance example, a buspar increase, additional hydroxyzine increase, and added blood pressure med. That’s not advice, that’s simply 1 example you’re not seeing happening. And it’s a common combo such that it’s pretty non-identifying, like metoprolol with baby aspirin.
The usual methods of protest are not working. And as much as people like to scream on Lemmy that old methods will work, let’s be realistic. They’re ignoring courts, laws, the us constitution, why would they listen to some “nobody” on a street in a city they don’t visit. I wish to god it were that simple but this is a new order, you’ll need new methods.
In the meantime, who do you call? There’s no customer service line where someone takes your governance complaint and offers a resolution.
Do you know anyone with any governance power at all? Most don’t.
Common reported feelings include: elephant sitting on my chest (overlapping symptom between heart attack and panic attack), feeling ready to “climb the walls”, despair, controlled fear, suffocation, among others.
The feelings are there, but to what effective actions?
Common reported feelings include: elephant sitting on my chest (overlapping symptom between heart attack and panic attack)
This is such an apt description. There is absolutely a metaphorical elephant sitting on top of all of us.
I bumped in to a guy at work the other day, he was in the building as a vendor, so not an employee of my company.
He’d stopped what he was doing to rant and rave about politics to some poor soul he’d happened upon here in the building who was clearly just humoring him.
This guy was parroting everything Trump had said to the letter. As every word from that guy’s mouth was some golden truth.
That’s a third of the country. People like that. Completely lost to ideology, incapable of independent thought. Proud that Trump is winning so hard all the time, and he is, of course, because he says he is.
Oh yeah, Australia is an authoritarian state due to… COVID laws right? Is that what you’re referring to?
COVID death camps?.. Or something?
We have an election in the next few months and our conservative party will likely win. They’re running a Trump-lite campaign around cutting government agencies.
Moreover we have always been very culturally, socially, militarily and politically aligned with the US.
For example, right now we tacitly support Ukraine but would have been very cautious in expressing that support since November last year. With our current progressive government it would be… challenging it Trump asked us to toe the line and declare Ukraine the aggressor. In a few months however I wouldn’t be surprised if our newly elected conservative government was much more willing to sing that song.
In my city last year there was a vocal group of conservatives trying to ban books at the library, and prevent the city supporting a LGBTIQ+ festival, and stoke foment over transgender people using public toilets. We import a lot of US conservative politics.
We may not seem like a particularly authoritarian country but we have ever been poised to become such. We’ve always scored very poorly on privacy, and media bias.
I’m Australian but don’t live there. It worries me how far right it’s getting. Australia being a very sporty place means transgender people in sport is a huge wedge that the Nazis can use. I’ve had to “disown” a bunch of family - including my mother, who I thought I learned my values from!
Yeah, I think it’s happening everywhere, less so in Australia than some other places.
Having a young son I often wonder about far right recruitment tactics.
Remember the Arab Spring? Massive protests in multiple North African countries, mostly peaceful regime changes. Those protests were hundreds of thousands of people - less than 1% of most country populations. Most of those nations were still going about their daily business like normal. Complaining about the awful government. Complaining about the disruption of the protests.
It’s really had to get people out of their daily routines.
In the US, there’s the extra issue that a significant part of the population are actually happy with recent events because they think it’s going to work out well for them, personally. Some of them think that the chaos is exactly the overthrow of 4 decades of terrible government they’ve been hoping for, and they don’t care what comes after.
Some of us understand. Some of us understood before this even happened. But we got the same “Well, both sides-.”
Now I’m just furious.
I talk to other Americans and they’re just like “Oh, well, both sides, you know?”
I guess it depends on the people you are talking to. The Americans I’ve met all seemed kinda sad at what US is going through.
The Americans I know outside the US (including me and my family) are devastated at the state of the US.
The Americans I know who still live there fully agree with my sentiments, but also are coping because they have to. Some of the cope is not reading news as much, not talking about it as often, shrugging and trying to just get by. It’s not good long term but it helps get through things like this. I think that’s actually part of the point from the fascists– make things so shitty you can’t keep up the anger.
steve bannon calls it flooding the zone. it’s a classic russian trick, too. the government lashes out omnidirectionally because it’s just about seeing what the people are capable of preventing right now
I’m losing my freaking mind over it. People, news, just going along like this is still business is usual. Real life Don’t Look Up.
In all countries the general population doesn’t understand anything. Certainly Americans don’t understand. If you’ve been to some countries that have already experienced the problems you mentioned, they might look more familiar to you, but I think Americans may be experiencing them for the first time.
See, my problem with this is how everybody is silently appending “except for me” to this opinion.
People have to eat.
Fundamentally the US is broken, and people don’t have themselves to support themselves very long.
Medical debt can wipe out your meager gains incredibly fast. The stock market tanking erases your only real savings you may have had.
Under those circumstances, it’s hard to take action when your hustling to survive.
This is actually what causes green plumbers causes now you have nothing left to lose.
Yeah. That’s the part that billionaires and health CEOs should be thinking more about. Plumbers with exceptional jumping ability are being created at a rate that should alarm them, in exchange for amounts of difference on the billionaire’s net worth that they’ll never even notice.
Social safety nets make everyone win, even the billionaires. We just have an exceptionally stupid crop of billionaires.
Almost half don’t care. Of the remaining, almost half do know and are appalled, while the rest also do know and applaud.
My friends and family absolutely know and see what is happening. When I go to the park and walk, I often hear people talking about what is happening (from the angle of “this is insane; how are they getting away with this.” The lady that manages the corner store that I chat with sees what’s going on. The people I work with are very aware.
Most of the people I know are scared and feel powerless to do anything about it. Of course, some are more aware than others and some are more scared than others, but they are at least moderately aware.
BUT, I live in a very liberal city and the people I just talked about are people I choose to associate with. My sample is heavily skewed.
I also run into a lot of people that are pro Trump. Drive 10 miles outside the city and you start running into a lot more MAGA folks. There are also people that avoid politics and are good at sticking their heads in the sand. Somehow they manage to remain unaware. Ignorance seems to be a concerningly common American trait.
BTW, OP, there’s a good chance the “both sides” people you know are republicans but are embarrassed to admit it. They’re the quiet trumpers — the ones that chose to elect a criminal who tried to violently overthrow the government four years ago. Unlike the rabid, loud MAGA folks, they are uncomfortable talking about this stuff because they know people find their views abhorrent. They use “both sides” as a method to indirectly defend their views without having to admit to having them.
Either that or they’re willfully ignorant about what is going on around them. But I find willfully ignorance and Repubicanism go hand in hand.
Americans have been brainwashed pretty hard and worn down over the decades. They’re sick, in debt, surrounded by voices telling them that it’s their fault if they’re poor. A lot of them are living paycheck to paycheck, with little room to take some time to realise how bad the situation is, even less room for maneuvering and organising.
The system works exactly as intended and what’s happening right now is the culmination of years and years of continuous propaganda.
And many world leaders and parties are taking notes right now, it’s gonna spread pretty hard and pretty fast.
